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Colin Judge: Testing structural materials in Idaho’s newest hot cell facility
Idaho National Laboratory’s newest facility—the Sample Preparation Laboratory (SPL)—sits across the road from the Hot Fuel Examination Facility (HFEF), which started operating in 1975. SPL will host the first new hot cells at INL’s Materials and Fuels Complex (MFC) in 50 years, giving INL researchers and partners new flexibility to test the structural properties of irradiated materials fresh from the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR) or from a partner’s facility.
Materials meant to withstand extreme conditions in fission or fusion power plants must be tested under similar conditions and pushed past their breaking points so performance and limitations can be understood and improved. Once irradiated, materials samples can be cut down to size in SPL and packaged for testing in other facilities at INL or other national laboratories, commercial labs, or universities. But they can also be subjected to extreme thermal or corrosive conditions and mechanical testing right in SPL, explains Colin Judge, who, as INL’s division director for nuclear materials performance, oversees SPL and other facilities at the MFC.
SPL won’t go “hot” until January 2026, but Judge spoke with NN staff writer Susan Gallier about its capabilities as his team was moving instruments into the new facility.
Alain Godot, Célia Lepeytre, Jean-Charles Hubinois, Aurélien Arseguel, Jean-Pierre Daclin, Christophe Douche
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 54 | Number 1 | July 2008 | Pages 231-234
Technical Paper | Waste Handling | doi.org/10.13182/FST08-A1802
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This method enables an indirect, non intrusive and non destructive measurement of the Tritium activity in wastes drums. The amount of tritium enclosed inside a wastes drum can be determined by the measurement of the leak rate of 3He of this latter.The simulation predicts that a few months are necessary for establishing the equilibrium between the 3He production inside the drum and the 3He drum leak.In practice, after one year of storage, sampling 3He outside the drum can be realized by the mean of a confining chamber that collect the 3He outflow.The apparatus, the experimental procedure and the calculation of tritium activity from mass spectrometric 3He measurements are detailed. The industrial device based on a confinement cell and the automated process to measure the 3He amount at the initial time and after the confinement time is described.Firstly, reference drums containing a certified tritium activity (HTO) in addition to organic materials have been measured to qualify the method and to evaluate its performances.Secondly, tritium activity of organic wastes drums issued from the storage building in Valduc have been determined.Results of the qualification and optimised values of the experimental parameters are reported in order to determine the performances of this industrial device.As a conclusion, the apparatus enables the measurement of an activity as low as 1 GBq of tritium in a 200 liters drum containing organic wastes.
